Error restoring a filelistonly from .bak file - sql

Question

I am trying to restore the filelistonly from a .bak file and am getting the following error:
Msg 3201, Level 16, State 2, Line 1 Cannot open backup device
'C:\Users...\myFile.bak'. Operating system error 5(Access is
denied.).
The file was initially blocked, but I unblocked it, so that shouldn't be the problem.

Answer 1

The error message explains exactly what is happening: you've placed the .BAK file in a folder that the SQL Server service account does not have access to.
You could "fix" this by granting access to your profile folder to the SQL Server service account, but this is an unnecessary violation of security best practices.
Much easier to just move the file to a location where the SQL Server service account already has native access, like the backup or data directory. You can find the data folder (there may be multiple valid locations) by looking at the result of the following query:
SELECT DISTINCT SUBSTRING(physical_name, 1, LEN(physical_name)
- CHARINDEX('\', REVERSE(physical_name)) + 1)
FROM [master].sys.master_files
WHERE [type] = 0;
And if you've backed up any databases (let's hope you have!), you can find out some valid backup locations this way:
SELECT DISTINCT SUBSTRING(physical_device_name, 1, LEN(physical_device_name)
- CHARINDEX('\', REVERSE(physical_device_name)) + 1)
FROM msdb.dbo.backupmediafamily;
Of course these don't take things into account such as read-only data files on read-only volumes, volumes SQL Server might have access to but you don't, volumes without enough free space for your .BAK file, or backup locations that have been used in the past but are no longer present or accessible.